Friday, October 31, 2008

The latter is an easy question for me: I write about only five things. Or rather, I tag only five subjects -- knowledge management, information architecture, technology, video games and poetry. That is a fairly strict taxonomy, but until further notice those are the only subjects I feel compelled and knowledgeable enough about to blog. Anything else I discuss either goes untagged or is tangentially related to one of those five topics (like this entry is to KM).

The other question -- what does blogging do for me -- is slightly more complex. When I started, my first blog entry described what I expected to get out of it. I blog -- like many other people, I suspect -- as a way of clarifying my own ideas. The physical activity of writing things down forces me to verify those thoughts. Some ideas that sound good bouncing loosely around in my head can seem perfectly stupid or unsupportable when written down.

There were other incentives as well:

Establish a reputation as a reasonably well-informed thinker about the topics in question

Connect with fellow professionals (like John) and share ideas

Establish a web presence for myself that is more personal and informative than a LinkedIn/MySpace/Facebook profile

However, these are all secondary goals, since there are quicker and more effective methods for achieving each of these. But the question was what does blogging do for me, not what do I think it will do for me. It turns out that my original concept has proven true. The blog has been very beneficial in helping me flesh out ideas and theories that I have had floating around for quite some time. It also spawns new ideas -- and hence new entries -- as I follow a train of thought and compare it to my fellow bloggers.

One consequence is that my blog is somewhat different than others. While others write quickly to jot their ideas down before they escape, my entries take on average a month or more to finish. I would like them to be faster, but I either don't have sufficient time or the ideas themselves take longer to foment.

Another consequence is that I have had the opportunity to "meet" several new people who I would not have met any other way. (Insert a shout out to everyone who has commented on my entries or referenced them in their own blogs. I am very grateful and in several cases they have led me to discover new ideas, theories, methodologies, or products I was not aware of. Thank you, everyone.)

The one thing I had not expected is that the blog helps me see the connectedness of my own ideas. At work, ideas are generated and applied as needed by the situation. Setting up SharePoint? you think about use cases, security policies, information lifecycle, archiving, etc. Participation in a KM program lower than expected? You think about community creation and facilitation, incentives, alignment to business processes, etc. The pragmatic need to address an issue keeps you focused and you inherently apply certain design principles. But you often do not have the time to examine the connection between the decisions. Taking the time to reflect on the ideas and decisions -- abstracted from the specific event -- allows you to understand your own motivations and how they interrelate.

This is reflected rather abstractly in the broad spectrum of subjects I have covered under the guise of KM and IA. But I expect it will become more explicit in the near future, as I outline some of the guiding principles that I have discovered myself pursuing. More on that later.

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Patrick C. Walsh recently asked for input on a concept he is calling lean intranets, based at least in part on the concept of lean manufacturing. The basic concept he is promoting is very attractive: make the intranet more productive by significantly reducing the content down to only that which actually helps employees "create value".

Certainly many if not all intranets could do with some dramatic reduction in either outdated or superfluous content. However, as attractive as the concept of a "lean intranet" is, it is based on a false assumption: that the intranet is a "thing" that can be managed or controlled as a single entity.

The problem is that the intranet serves more than one purpose and more than one master. Unlike manufacturing, where there is one linear process that can be optimized to reduce "waste", the intranet is more like a city, with hundreds or thousands of diverse members each with their own goals and objectives.

The reason this caught my eye is not because Walsh's theory is fatally flawed -- in fact it is not. His prescription for creating a lean intranet may make a few spurious assumptions, but the goal and many of his suggestions are still valid. (More on than later.) The reason the assumption is important to recognize is because the same assumption is endemic to corporate managers and intranet teams everywhere.

The Intranet as a Thing and its Postulates

For any company larger than, say, 200 or 300 people, you cannot ask "what is the purpose of the intranet" as if it was a singular thing. However, this is exactly how it is treated by many, many companies, resulting in some rather spectacularly dysfunctional behavior.

Most of the time when people -- especially managers -- talk about "the intranet" they are talking about the corporate intranet portal; the internal "home page" for the company. The problem is that the portal is -- quite literally -- just the tip of the iceberg in terms of content and uses of the intranet.

This "intranet as a thing" thinking results in a number of fallacious assumptions:

The corporate portal is everyone's home page

Only pages linked to by the portal are part of the intranet -- everything else is noise

You can control the intranet by dictate

Many companies enforce the first assumption by setting the intranet portal as the browser home page as part of their standard PC configuration. But, is the corporate home page the most useful page for employees? Shouldn't they start at their division or their department's home page? And, let's face it, most experienced users navigate through bookmarks/favorites, significantly diminishing the importance of the home page...

Some companies also enforce the second postulate -- "the intranet is what I say it is" -- by limiting the corporate search engine to crawling only "official" pages. The argument is that by restricting the scope of search, you increase the value of the results that are returned. The actual consequence is that you put up castle walls around a portion of your intranet, leaving many employees (and their content!) outside the walls. This form of electronic feudalism creates significant barriers to sharing information across organizational boundaries within the corporation.

Finally, many companies try to control their intranets by dictate: they define requirements and standards for the appearance, structure, and even content of web pages within the intranet. These rules start out as well intentioned, attempting to define a common look & feel for the intranet browsing experience (usually through a common intranet banner, colors, and fonts). But it soon extends to guidelines for the layout and even the content of pages.

Again, this mandated layout is done under the auspices of standardizing the browsing experience and simplifying maintenance, but the result is that lower level groups are handcuffed into following a structure that may have no relation to the information they need to present. A prime example is intranet guidelines that require each organizational home page start with a mission statement and "news". I cannot tell you how many times I have watched groups struggle to come up with news items simply to fulfill this stylistic requirement.

Creating a Lean Intranet

As I said earlier, Walsh's assumption that it is possible to define a single set of criteria for identifying and eliminating wasteful content on the intranet from the top is flawed because the intranet does not have a single purpose, as a manufacturing process has. However, at each of the lower levels at which intranet content is owned and maintained it ought to be possible to define and apply such criteria. Because that is the level at which the goal of the content is defined and understood.

So although I am quibbling that a process for lean intranets cannot be applied at the top level, there is real opportunities for applying it at lower levels, assuming the corporate style police allow it.

Friday, October 3, 2008

Yesterday Nintendo announced a new version of the dual screen DS, called the DSi.

There are a number of minor enhancements: slightly larger screen area, slimmer case, a (toy) camera, improved audio.... But the change that appears to be the primary reason for the upgrade is replacing the GBA slot with a standard SD memory slot.

By using a flash card, DSi owners will be able to download and store games on their DS. (Currently downloaded games are only available as long as the system is on and the game is in memory.) This allows for downloadable content ala WiiWare for the DS.

The SD card can also be used to transfer pictures taken on the DS to the Wii. But the DSi camera is such low resolution, this is essentially a waste. (My phone takes better pictures.)

The use of flash memory for downloadable games is so obvious it is a wonder it was not built into the original DS or the DS Lite. But thinking back to when the DS was first introduced, the concept of the dual screen itself was so revolutionary, the use of a GBA slot to provide a level of backwards compatibility was clearly more important to help consumers make the transition. But now the GameBoy market is quiescent; to the point where removing the GBA slot will cause little to no concern in the market.

So, is it worth upgrading your DS when the DSi becomes available? I think that depends on two things:

How robust the "DSiWare" market is at launch. If Nintendo provides compelling downloadable content, the upgrade will pay for itself. Unfortunately, Nintendo has a checkered history for supporting its own hardware upgrades and add-ons (think: VirtualBoy, Gamecube Bongos, GameBoy Camera...) this is a new system, not an add-on. But it will require games and content to make it useful.

What other forms of "flash" downloadable content will be supported.

Clearly the enhanced audio capabilities would suggest downloadable mp3 music files are a target. But the real question, for me personally, is will Nintendo support other user-generated content, in particular home-brew games?

Nintendo has a great opportunity here to open up an entirely new market in the video game industry. Only Xbox, thus far, has embraced the hobbyist game developer with its XNA toolkit. But creating a game and being able to share it are two different things and Microsoft has not created a viable marketplace for small developers yet. Providing the ability to load homebrew games onto standard SD cards could dramatically change the indy game marketplace.

Is this a big market? Compared to the casual market the Wii created, no. But compared to the market for listening to MP3s on a DSi which is three times the size (with a fraction of the memory) of an iPod, this could be a real game changer, similar to the Wii.

Clearly there are issues around licensing and security -- there would need to be distinctions between commercial titles that need to protect themselves against copy piracy and simpler downloadables. But compared to the potential for leapfrogging Microsoft and XNA (and the fact that they need to address the piracy issue with rewritable media anyway) I would think this would be almost too good an opportunity to miss.

The only thing standing in the way is Nintendo's past stance against anything unlicensed, which goes back all the way to the original NES. It is unclear whether they have the vision to set a new path. WiiWare is a beginning, but the qualifications to get signed up for that program excludes all but the biggest indy developers.

One possible alternate route is if Nintendo collaborates with the likes of DigiPen or Carnegie-Mellon to develop simplified game development "systems" (essentially a game-making game). This has been tried in the past. But without a distribution mechanism, the results were little more than private fiddling. Using a combination of a "casual" game development system, writable media, an online community, and friend codes (I know everyone hates them, but they do offer protection), Nintendo could once again revolutionize the game industry by creating the equivalent of Flickr or YouTube for games.

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

"Poets Hitchhiking on the Highway" by Gregory CorsoFrom The Happy Birthday of Death, New Directions 1960[Wednesday, October 1st]

Corso always strikes me as one of those "friends of the famous" -- famous, but for no identifiable reason. Friend of Kerouac. Friend of Ginsberg. Author of Gasoline. And also The Happy Birthday of Death.

I remember being excited by Gasoline -- what? say, 35 years ago? -- but for quite some time I have been unable to reproduce or to explain that feeling. Happy Birthday always seemed to be the proof that his fame was misplaced. The stilted rhymes, the clumsy archaic speech, antiquated references, nonsense as meaning... The quintessential post flash in the pan.

Corso is perhaps the one Beat poet most bound by time. Outside the era that bore him, he feels alien and outdated. Even Kerouac, even Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti as "contemporary" as their writing was, manage to transcend that moment. But Corso doesn't.

Is that a failing? For modern readers yes. But perhaps they were only meant as momentary expressions. The trouble is it is hard to assess "value" or "beauty" of something that doesn't last.

Which is all the more strange that I found a poem I liked in Happy Birthday. "Poets Hitchhiking" shows Corso's humor, directed at himself as much as anyone else, mocking his own writing and its tenuousness ("we ended by melting away, hating the air!"). Perhaps he did know how fragile it was after all.

"A Form of Woman" by Robert CreeleyFrom for Love, Charles Scribner's Sons 1962[Thursday, October 2nd]

Creeley's poems are almost devoid of imagery. What images are there are a form of monologue (or in some cases, like the famous poem "I Know a Man", dialog).

As a consequence, his poems for all their simplicity are very hard to read for a modern reader. Unlike most 20th century verse, his poems are written from the outside in rather than the inside out, in an abrupt documentary style. What emotion is there is only that which might be expressed -- and visible-- outwardly. "I could not touch you. / I wanted very much to / touch you / but could not." Add to this staccato, objective style his idiosyncratic line breaks and you have a tough read ahead of you. But when they work, his poems form a unique experience that comes into focus so slowly, you don't realize it until the poem has you.

"Self-Portrait in a Stainless Steel Mirror" by James CrennerFrom My Hat Flies On Again, L'Epervier Press 1981[Friday, October 3rd]

I don't remember where I first heard of James Crenner. Perhaps I found his work in a magazine. Maybe he was recommended by a friend of a friend. Whichever, the memory of his work stuck with me and I spent several years trying to find more of it, until last year when I finally found a copy of My Hat Flies On Again. Now I see why I was so persistent.

Crenner's poems don't seem special -- the subjects are interesting but not unique, his style of writing is familiar... But each poem has at least one line, an image, or an idea that stays with you for days. In "Application Blank" he describes himself as "curator of the part of my life that is over" -- a killer line. In "Self-Portrait" he turns an objective description of his own face into a landscape "with the trace of a bird, the trace of some weeds" where the entire poem lingers with you long after you put the book down. No particular line, but the poem as a whole.

There are flashy writers who surprise you and there are "serious" poets you try to make you think long and hard on things. Crenner isn't either of these, but he can do both. He is that talented. But it is a quiet, understated talent, which is what makes it all the more unusual and gratifying.

I wonder if anyone reads E.E. Cummings anymore. He is easy to discount as all style and no substance. The uniqueness of his poems and their total reliance on surface -- the use of lower case, the staccato diction of speech and thought -- make the poems seem almost like parodies of themselves. And it's true: Cummings' poems either succeed or fail. And when they fail, they fail spectacularly. But when they succeed, the success is equally exuberant.

Cummings uses words like painters use brushes -- he "paints" his poems. I don't mean in the superficial sense of concrete poems or Apollinaire's poème-objet. Cummings is not interested in constructing sentences, he constructs scenes where dialog runs together and thoughts intersect and bounce off each other. His poems are more like screenplays without scenery or physical players. As he says himself "Since feeling is first / who pays attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you."

The tragedy is that in his later poems Cummings retains the style, but attempts to apply it to physical scenes rather than human interaction, and the result is an exceedingly dull imitation of his earlier work. But until then, his work can be a wild ride.

"Baseball Cards #2" by Jim Danielsfrom The Long Ball, Pig in a Poke Press 1988[Sunday, October 5th]

There have been some great baseball poems. W.C. Williams' paean to baseball "At the Ball Game" in Spring and All, for example. And I recently found a stunning baseball poem by Tom Clark. So I have no objection to the subject itself. Unfortunately, Jim Daniels' poems in The Long Ball have little more than the subject and that is not enough.

These are poems because Daniels says they are, but he doesn't use any of the power of poetry. The language is flat. There is no under current, no secondary meaning. There is only what is described and what is described is, well, dull. Am I being harsh? Probably. But this stuff isn't for me.

"What the Rocks Say" by Robert DesnosTranslated by Anne Waldman, source unknown[Monday. October 6th]

Robert Desnos was one of the first surrealist poets I read in the original French and, although my French is sketchy at best, I learned enough to be disappointed by most translations. This is unfortunate, because modern translations of Desnos are actually quite good for those unable to read the French. But I also learned that Desnos is very hard to translate because it is almost as if he had no voice of his own. His poems are friendly but stark, as if he were channeling surrealism itself. There is little of the personal style or linguistic quirks you find in his fellow surrealists, such as Eluard, Soupault, or Peret. So it is hard to determine what style or voice to use in English.

I originally intended to read a poem from Michael Benedikt's translation (22 Poems, Kayak Books 1971), but while leafing through it I found a xerox I made many years ago and had slipped in at the point in the book with the matching translation by Benedikt. I obviously put it there because I thought Waldman did a better job of translating the poem (and still do). But it also shows that the differences are subtle. Here are three translations of the first line of the poem (the third being from Selected Poems of Robert Desnos translated by Carolyn Forche and William Kulik, Ecco 1991):

The queen of the azure and the fool of the void go past you in a taxicab (Benedikt)

The Queen of the Blue & the Fool of Space pass by in a taxi (Waldman)

The azure queen and the madman of the void go by in a cab (Forche and Kulik)

"In the Pocket" by James Dickeyfrom The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy, Doubleday 1970[Tuesday. October 7th]

I am not a big fan of poems that meander all over the page -- poems with large gaps between words or lines that start in different places. There is plenty of power in language, in the rhythms, the sounds of the words, and the line breaks. These exaggerated placements seem heavy-handed and, in most cases, unrewarding. In bad poems, I find this sort of extravagance annoying and a crude attempt to hide the weakness of the poem itself. In good poems I simply try to ignore the spaces.

Dickey is one writer where I try to ignore the gaps. However, in Dickey's poems, that is difficult. He uses spaces as punctuation: breaking up and intermixing chunks of thought -- different threads of a story -- as a videographer splices together film.

Here we have another sports poem (football this time) and another poem ostensibly about the surface of things. Dickey is trying to reproduce the tension and rush of the football experience from the player's point of view by piling image upon image, piece by fragmented piece. It is a tall order to reproduce it in words. And when he gets to the end of the poem with its rush of all upper case words, like a drill sergeant shouting out orders, my initial impulse is to resist it. Too demanding, unjustified, manipulative. But frankly, the poem works. And as unsettling as it is, Dickey effectively achieves his goal.

Mark Doty is a very talented writer. His poems are mesmerizing in their use of language. The lines stretch out like a lush tropical garden with its heady odors, colors, and cacaphony of images. In a way, the verbiage is so lush it is almost overwhelming. Unfortunately he is also one of several very talented writers who I simply don't "get".

I can admire these poems, but I can't enjoy them. As rich as they are in images and language, the poem never really connects with me as a reader. In a way, it is the richness, the lushness of the writing that stands in the way. "The flag flapped like a towel hung out to dry ... the single breathing undulance that sea and sky made ... the water that was hurrying with the idea of storm ..." The images are so thick and fraught with meaning, they end up being a sort of a blur. The language doesn't allow for enough variation to be realistic. It is like looking at an exhibit of Faberge eggs: beautiful, intricate, well crafted, but ultimately meant for a different time or place.

Now, I am more than happy to admit this as a flaw in myself, not in the poems. I can see why some people would love this work, if they feel connected to it. But unless you feel involved, the rich language and intricate craft ultimately becomes a barrier -- an invisible wall of glass -- that separates you from the emotion of the poem.

Consequently, when he tries to pull the scene and the emotions together with lines like "I saw the shoreline break / above your heart..." it fails. Because by that time I am already on the other side of the glass. And that is disappointing. Disappointing because I would like to like these poems. I can see them, I can admire them, but the rarity of the language gets in the way.

Note:There was a lapse in new entries to this blog entry for two reasons. First, I made a mistake (more on this below) which caused me to rethink. Second, I was busy preparing for a birthday party which consumed all my free time. But now I will catch up...

I made a mistake. I overlooked a book on my shelf on Wednesday. When I discovered the mistake, I had two simultaneous, competing thoughts: "oh, I can just skip that" and "I should take it out of sequence, because the point of the exercise is to get me to read different writers". The trouble is the book I skipped was Emily Dickinson.

I don't like Emily Dickinson's poetry. Never have. Thing is, I am not fond of rhymed poetry. It tends to be too sing-songy, more interested in getting the rhyme that following the reason. Frost may have complained about free verse being like playing tennis without a net, but rhymed verse sometimes feels like playing tennis with your shoes tied together.

This dislike of rhyme is not unequivocable. I am very fond of G.M. Hopkins. Frost also has some great poems. But rhyme can be a barrier. Add to that Dickinson's short lines, arbitrary and incessant use of capitalization and dashes and you have something more resembling a billboard than a poem.

Be that as it may, there is something enjoyable about her poems. It is not just the marching band rhythms (bang! bang! bang!). It is a turn of phrase, the flutter of language underneath the beat. So when she says "When Men -- and Boys -- and Carts -- and June, / Go down the Fields to 'Hay' --" it is like skipping with the entire village -- including time itself (June) -- heading into the fields. I can see the pleasure in that. So maybe I don't dislike everything she does...

"The Elephant" by Carlos Drummond de Andradefrom Travelling in the Family edited and translated by Thomas Colchie and Mark Strand, Ecco 1986[Sunday, Oct. 19th]

Drummond's poems are what I think of as South American Surrealism. French Surrealism was about language. The entire context of the poem -- the subject, the location, the words describing them -- falls under the surrealist lens. In South America, Surrealism tends to be about objects. The object is surreal, unnatural, or out of place, but it plays within a perfectly normal, real landscape. Neruda perhaps epitomizes this style in poetry while Garcia Marques is a master practitioner in prose.

In Drummond's poem, the elephant itself is the surreal element, not only because it is out of place but it is manfactured ("I made an elephant from the little I have"). Once this surreal element is introduced, everything it does and the reactions of those around it are perfectly normal ("my elephant goes down a crowded street"). The juxtaposition of the fragile man-made elephant and its interaction with our everyday world are what gives the poem its power.

It is interesting that this style is very hard to reproduce elsewhere. US poets who try it tend to come off as posturing. (Perhaps we don't have enough everyday life in our poems to make it come off realistically.) In Eastern Europe, surrealism takes more of a theoretical turn, where everything about the poem, including the landscape, has the feel of some sort of great social experiment. (I am thinking of poets like Vasko Popa here.)

I have a love/hate relationship with Alan Dugan. One day I read his poems and find them energizingly irreverent, witty, and erudite. The next day I find them pretentious, self-important, and petulant.

At first I thought it was me. There certainly are poets where I have to be in the right state of mind to be able to fully appreciate their work. Otherwise I read too fast or too slow and miss the essential ingredient.

But I have come to believe it isn't me this time. Dugan's poems truly are that hit and miss. Because he spends so much time tilting at the gods and demigods of poetry -- ridiculing high-blown language, mocking the favorite topics and attitudes of "classic" verse -- he runs a risk of leaning too much the other direction. I don't object to the four letter words or discussion of taboo subjects (drunkenness, masturbation, etc.). But these aren't the unrestrained outburst of working class minds. They are often strategic and staged more for shock value than for real need of expression. And that is when his poems fail for me. It is the false harshness, the studied realism that tends to let him down as a writer.

But when he escapes this and mixes traditional styles with modern sensibility (as he does in "Waitress") he is well worth reading.

Eady is one of my favorite young poets. I say "young" although I have no idea how old he is. It's just that his writing is refreshingly individualistic and has the air of youth.

I am currently reading his selected poems (Hardheaded Weather), but today I chose to go back to the first book of his I read. Eady's writing is light -- not subject-wise, but in the language. The rhythms are punchy, almost syncopated, like a good jazz riff. The lines also tend to be short. There is no shortage of words -- his poems are not minimalistic, just well crafted. And each poem is set off by one or two really beautiful turns of phrase, like this poem's closing: " Muggy, the announcer predicts, / Like a man who is / The last one to know."

In fact, the only real danger in Eady's early poems is that the images may be too perfect and remind us that this is, after all, artifice.

Russell Edson is a perfect example of why poetry is undefinable. As soon as you define it and try to nail it down, you find a poem that defies that definition. Edson's poems defy almost all definition.

First, if poems are about format, Edson's poems are prose poems, so there are no line breaks or rhyme. If poems are about things, Edson's prose poems -- although narrative in style -- bend and weave keeping their actual subject a secret, sometimes beyond the end of the poem. If poems are about emotion, Edson's prose poems often result in a sense of ambiguity -- ambiguity towards what the poem is about and ambiguity towards one's own feelings about the poem.

When you get to the end of one of his poems, you feel almost as if you are on the deck of a ship in high seas. What do you think of the poem? What is it about? The impact is dizzying. It is as if the poem keeps moving long after you finish reading.

"Mirror of October" by Gunnar Ekeloffrom I Do Best Alone at Night translated by Robert Bly, Charioteer Press 1977[Thursday, Oct. 23rd]

I respect Ekelof as a poet, but I can't say I ever liked any of his work. His poems are deeply philosphical -- everything turns to the universal so quickly, it is almost as if the narrator needn't be there. Even the title poem with its titular first person quickly surrenders to the universal. "Somewhere / chance is sleeping in the cards. Somewhere / a truth has been said once already..." Personally, I can only take so much of this type of ominous foreboding, this mystical visioning before I begin to have my doubts. Where is the everyday in this? Nowhere, perhaps. But the poem has to have some grounding if it expects to reach across the gap in the page and convince me.

As I say, this is a personal bias which might be exacerbated by the distance created by the translation. But Bly is a good translator in most cases. So I think it is just a difference between Mr. Ekelof and myself...

I don't have much to say about Eliot. I liked his early poems (1917) when I was younger. Probably because they were closest to what I was reading of contemporary poems -- somewhat narrative, somewhat imagistic. Now I am beginning to understand his later poems, when he became more interested in the complexities of philosophy and religion. Not organized philosophy and religion (well, not only those) but his personal views and how they and he fit into society. He was still a poet and his goal was to express both thoughts and feelings. Without resorting to imagism, he managed this by layering impressions and descriptions one on top of another to try and build the complex portrait he wanted: "In this valley of dying stars / In this hollow valley / This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms / In this last of meeting places / We grope together..."

These poems are enjoyable. Like browsing through the dictionary looking for unusual words is enjoyable. There are surprises at every turn ("scenario: an albino industrialiste, invited to the beach at noon"). But there is very little to hold these twists and turns of speech together. (Except, perhaps, the poems' titles and even they seem relatively random.)

I used to get upset at Elmslie and poets like him. It seemed like they were wasting the reader's time. But I've got to the point where I can enjoy them for what they are. The problem is, any one poem is as good as another; there is no real distinction. So you can enjoy them, but you can just as easily put them down.

I have always been attracted to Esenin. He is the romantic/ tragic figure of the artistic personality in the face of overwhelming indifference (or outright belligerence) from their the social environment. Unfortunately for Esenin, the portrait ends up being more tragi-comic than romantic, as his own conceit and self-destructive tendencies made him the poster child of the narcissistic dissolution the socialist art councils believed was the ultimate outcome of individualistic artistic expression.

These are not particularly good translations. but then again, I have never really found any good translations of Esenin. I suspect it gets the words across, but the music is missing or distorted. It's like trying to read a book of poetry on the subway or while a marching band is going past. You get the gist of it, but the sound is drowned out by the surroundings.

"Junkman's Obbligato" by Lawrence Ferlinghettifrom A Coney Island of the Mind, New Directions 1958[Monday, Oct. 27th]

Ferlinghetti was one of the first contemporary poets I read as a youngster. His poems are the right mix of rebelliousness, anger, excitement, and a moderate level of awareness of literary past to appeal to a teenager. It is not so much what he was saying as how he was saying it that struck a chord.

Unfortunately, many years later, one's earlier enthusiasms often seem embarrassingly naive in hindsight. So I was trepidatious to pick up his books again. Yes, he is a sort of second-rate Allen Ginsberg. Yes, the overly serious "Beat"-ness of Pictures of the Gone World has not aged particularly well. No, poems like "Junkman's Obbligato" do not hold together conceptually as we might have come to expect from reading more thoroughly in the genre. But rereading this poem and others, it is surprising how much of Ferlinghetti's voice and concerns do still come across. I have never heard him read in person, but I have a strong sense of how the poem was meant to be read -- impassioned, involved, and enthralled -- and I still can put on that mantle and enjoy these poems much more than I had expected.

Finlay is not a poet. Or rather, he is many more things than just a poet. He is an artist who works in many different media and forms.

In truth, Poems to Hear and See may be one of his least successful works of "poetry". It falls under the general category of concrete poetry and -- like much of the genre -- is intellectually intriguing but emotionally unmoving.

However, several of these "poems" were also sculptures. "Wave/Rock" itself was produced as words etched in glass. Other poems in the book I have seen as sculptures in glass, marble, or neon lights. The real impact of these works simply are not apparent on the page and do not become visible until you see them in their "natural" environment.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of Finlay's work is the "garden", Little Sparta, which he created in a small town in Scotland. For anyone who has not been exposed to his work, I strongly encourage you to look up and find his sculptures if you can. At a minimum, visit the Little Sparta web site to get a feel for one unique way in which poetry can be created, and the impact it can have.

Karen Fish is part of the University of Iowa post neo imagist influence that pervaded the 70's and 80's (and a good part of the 90's). I can say that because that's part of my intellectual heritage as well. Her writing is very precise, with an eye for detail and a well-formed turn of phrase. "The mountains in the distance are pewter -- / like the pitcher, cool and sweating on my grandmother's lace / tablecloth." The focus is not on the object, but on the collection of objects -- the tableau -- and in many cases, their emotional history.

She does this well. She has a very good ear ("the light has only one thing left to do"). My only concern is that her work relies so heavily on the emotional baggage that it can at times seem almost like cliches. The lace, the barn, the old lady washing in a tub in the kitchen. I have seen this before in movies and in paintings and she is relying so heavily on the feeling this evokes that it becomes, well, trite. The danger of relying on the cultural associations of objects and landscapes is that the poem becomes fragile, like ice on a puddle -- trying to hold still something that is moving.

"One evening at the turn of the century..." by Jean Follainfrom A World Rich in Anniversaries, Logbridge-Rhodes 1981[Thursday, Oct. 30th]

Follain is also interested in objects, in the details of a moment in time. However, one would never mistake him for an American poetry school student. It is not just a matter of talent; it is approach and a vision.

I have always been intrigued by this book; it attracts and repels at the same time. I am drawn in by the writing, but left uncertain by the poems as a whole. Looking more carefully now, I think I see the reason for both. Follain's poems follow a pattern. They start with a detailed description of a scene -- a tableau vivant almost. ("One evening at the turn of the century you see a mathematician reach home carrying a birdcage.") The scene expands with more details ("black and yellow hansoms... the dog running down an alleyway... the furious, mustachioed butcher...").

But the poem soon moves beyond the scene into the abstract ("In the future... citizens who have survived the massacres..."). What massacres? What future? Any emotional baggage that you bring to the original scene is forced to vie with the abstraction, creating a new view and response to the entire proceedings. Follain then brings the poem to a close physically linking the abstract to the present ("before their eyes, the ghost of the professor.. the uninhabited cage in his hand.")

It is almost like a magician's sleight of hand with which Follain brings present and future together. But the uncertainty? It is a trick, and it works. And Follain's final twist usually adds another perspective to the scene, which sounds like closure, but is it? The closure brings the pieces together but tends to leave the scene suspended, often with a sense that the future has already been decided. But what that decision is -- even if you know the results -- is not clear.

This sense of suspended animation is very powerful and reading a few of his poems can be a very moving experience. Unfortunately, the more you read, the more you begin to recognize the pattern and start to lose the surprise at the end. They all kind of end the same way. Can that be? Well, can it?

Forché is another member of the Poetry School School. This group is not identified by a specific style as much as a general aesthetic, focused on precision and detailed descriptions of scenes or objects; what I sometimes refer to as the post neo imagist movement. These are the poets who were taught or were teaching in the various writing programs in the 70's and 80's. It was the pervasive form of poetry pretty much until the Language poets showed up.

Forché is both a member of that general caste and a demonstration of how diverse it is. Her writing is precise and sometimes overly "writerly" ("I am the woman whose photograph you will not recognize, whose face emptied your eyes...") But there is no fragility here. Underlying all of her poems is a fierce personal vision that drives the poems forward. You may not always understand or agree with everything said, but you feel the scenes unfolding as much as you see them. In her best poems, you become the persona, the narrator. At worst, you see them in third person; detached but fully aware.